Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

He wanted to explain that a scared part of him was still scared. That no matter how many times Dad explained that Buddy was safe, the scared part of him never heard, or never believed. But he had no idea how to frame such a thought with words.

August briefly tried that on for size. Wondered if he longed for summer because summer made it so much easier to breathe.

my mouth was involved. My own voice seemed to work all on its own that morning.

Not as sure as you are. But it's okay. Either way it's okay. I like the world with all its faults. It was an honor to have a place in it. But going where Nan went is an appealing option, too. Whatever

If you're feeling something, other people in other places are feeling it, too.

I think we all more or less know where we stand with people, whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not.

The value of your life is

She was the bravest, quietest girl she knew how to be at a time like that.

Every strange thing you see everybody do," she said, "that's it. That's the fear. Every time you look at a person and their behavior is a mystery to you, that's their fear. All the rage you see in the world. All the arguments and the wars and the guns. All the loud music and the big monster trucks and the expensive, fancy cars, and the political rallies. That's all the fear that people don't want to admit they have.

Ruth said, "Ham told me once that the problem with people is that we forget that something unexpected can happen at any time.

There's so much I see every day and don't really understand and I just don't stop to think about the fact that I don't really understand.

She said it was very selfish of me to base my participation in the world on whether the world was pleasing me at the moment. She said of course the world can be cruel; this is a given. She asked if I knew what she would have sacrificed to be ninety-two.

People need help with perspective sometimes. If they're all alone in their own head, they can lose perspective. Sometimes you need to use somebody else like a mirror.

Nothing is more dangerous than words. Words can kill your soul.

So I sort of broke into a million pieces but didn't let the pieces all tumble apart. Like I tried to just be cracked all over but not shattered.

Nathan had never liked anger. It seemed a barbaric and undignified emotion. He knew it always masked fear or hurt, and had often wished everyone could simply be sensible enough to cut out the middleman. He

Life gives us nothing outright.

People think complaining about a bad thing will make them feel better. But it just stokes it. It keeps it alive. It's like feeding it. This is why I never liked the expression pet peeve. Why keep a peeve as a pet? Why give it a dish of water and a nice spot to lie down in the corner? It's just choosing to be peeved.

It isn't nice to hurt other people, and if you absolutely must hurt someone, it's important that you never do it on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day, or maybe even a day or two before or after that.

There's a time in the middle of our lives when we tend to have it under good control, but coming into the world and going out of the world, we're much more vulnerable. We need help. And being willing to be that help for someone is a very high calling, in my opinion. It's really the purest definition of the word serve.

If I was going to get hurt, or have a hard time, I wanted to do it all alone, with nobody looking.

Then he asked, "How long did it take you to love her?

like a mask, and in his other hand he held an open can of

That was the problem with my mother. I could never fully get her voice out of my head.